Sullied By That Creature's Name

Even I have to laugh.

Apparently, on Twitter, Vinnie McAviney, as he would probably not thank me for still calling him but that was how he first introduced himself to me, has been in touch with Kamm as if he (Vinnie) and I had never met.

He is in fact a former tutee of mine who, as undergraduates sometimes do, went off on a power trip on being given some little position, in his case when he scaled the dizzy heights of Editor of Palatinate, Durham's legendarily bad student newspaper.

In order to ingratiate himself with Kamm, not without success, he ran some piece of cock and bull about me, and he has never got over the fact that no one of the slightest importance paid the slightest attention, because, well, it was in Palatinate.

To this day, I have never read it. I never will. I doubt that a copy of it still exists anywhere. Everyone has long since forgotten about it. Except him. Several times per day, under multiple personalities, for two and half years so far.

It is side-splitting stuff that he mentions Palatinate in, for example, his many comments on the webpages selling my books, as if any grown-up person could possibly care less about that even within this university, never mind outside. Sad and mad rather than bad. Unlike Kamm.

Anyway, Kamm's - how shall I put this? - Straussian tactics do finally seem to be finding him out, after he appeared on Radio Three opposite John Milbank and tried to brand him a 9/11 truther, a favourite Kamm smear, which he has been putting about, including under the aegis of one the largest (if most disreputable) media corporations in the world, for quite some time.

He has made it up out of thin air, but he and his weird little cult dutifully scream "troofer, anti-Semite, Holocaust denier" at anyone who ever points out this or any other of his transparent fictions, such as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. Well, John is a tougher cookie than he looks...

I did ponder including both the John Milbank "troofer" line, and Kamm's long campaign of criminal harassment against Neil Clark, eventually causing the police to become involved, in Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory.

But one does not want one's text sullied by that creature's name (Damian Thompson is not mentioned by name, either, just as he was not in Essays Radical and Orthodox, although he is referred to in both of them), so the following has had to suffice where that cult is concerned:

As for the blood libel, what about the blood libel that all opposition to the Iraq War was anti-Semitic? That was said routinely at the time, and for a long time thereafter. They all did it. Every one of them.

Certain British websites only stopped when I lately started making a fuss about it, especially the powerful Harry’s Place, the limitlessly funded notice board by means of which Israel’s violently racist, fanatically anti-British secular Hard Right incites its supporters in Britain to torrential abuse of specific academic, political and media figures and their actual or potential employers, and even of the likes of student unions, while attempting, not without success, to take over the Labour Party.

That blood libel still crops up from time to time. The people loudest in berating Raed Salah for his blood libel put their own into print or onto the airwaves every single day for months, and regularly for years. They have never expressed one word of remorse, either for that or for their catastrophic war itself.

And:

The signatories to the Project for the New American Century, the Patrons of the Henry Jackson Society, Avigdor Lieberman’s party and those who sit in coalition with it have on their hands the blood of 69 Norwegians, mostly teenagers.

The same goes for Kamm.

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